Sailing To Byzantium By W. B. Yeats: Poem, Meaning And Analysis

Sailing to Byzantium is a powerful Irish poem. Another week, another Yeats poem! He features so many times in the top 100 Irish poems list that it is hard not to feature him. The central theme behind this beautiful poem is man vs eternity and nature. It comes in at number 13 on the top 100 Irish poems list.

I would have to say that of all of Yeats’s poems; this one is a powerful poem. And if you, for some reason, don’t know who W.B Yeats is, William Butler Yeats was a Nobel Prize-winning Irish writer, widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Old sailing poem by Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium

Written in 1926 and included in Yeats’s most outstanding single collection, 1928’s The Tower. I guess as we know, the older we get, the more we tend to look back on life. This was certainly evident in last week’s Irish poem Another September. Yeats really goes into the difficulty of keeping one’s soul alive in a fragile, failing human body. Yeats is leaving Ireland to sail to Byzantium, an ancient Greek city.

I hope you enjoy this once again wonderful Irish poem by W. B Yeats.

Sailing to Byzantium

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Sailing to Byzantium: meaning and analysis

Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in 1926, in his early sixties, and it opens his great 1928 collection The Tower.

What it means

The speaker is an old man who feels out of place in a world full of youth, love and new life, where everyone is caught up in “sensual music” and forgets the things that last. So he sets sail for Byzantium, the old name for Constantinople, which for Yeats stood for a civilisation where art, religion and craft were one.

There he asks the sages to free his soul from his ageing, “dying animal” of a body, and to gather him “into the artifice of eternity”. In the last stanza he imagines being reborn not as a living thing but as a golden bird made by a goldsmith, singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. It’s a poem about growing old, and about whether art can outlast the body.

The first line, “That is no country for old men”, gave Cormac McCarthy the title of his novel No Country for Old Men.

Form

Four stanzas of ottava rima, eight lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABABCC, a stately form that suits the poem’s ceremonial voyage.

Key themes

Ageing and mortality
Art and immortality
The body and the soul

More Irish poems

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